Odori Park

This guide to Odori Park in Sapporo starts on a February night in nineteen fifty, when six teenagers from local high schools hauled shovels onto this stretch of grass to carve snow into statues nobody had asked for, on land that had already served as a wartime firebreak and potato patch. It follows how that unplanned bit of fun kept growing through the decade, eventually drawing in soldiers from a nearby Self-Defense Force base with trucks and cranes. Stand on the grass and gravel underfoot and picture it buried under tons of packed snow every winter.